Subtle Bluntness

I’ve been thinking a lot about bloggers and blogging.  I read something somewhere about how our little writing hobby is becoming Serious Business for companies, and I know personally some of the folks I’ve worked with have had the goal of turning blogs into cash via social media and the like.  That’s all well and good, and I think everyone’s entitled to make a buck off of whatever they do and however they do it, but I think for a lot of bloggers it all goes back to one simple fact.

Bloggers are vain.

Maybe we’re not physically vain, though I know some bloggers are.  What we are is emotionally vain.  Not to generalize or anything (he says right before launching into a series of broad generalizations), but we’re a lot of misfits.  Basically, there’s no such thing as a normal blogger who doesn’t do it for pay alone.  Hell, even those that do it for pay are probably weird, too.  We’re overworked young professionals.  We’re mothers stuck indoors with the kids all day who need to speak to someone on an adult level.  We’re geeks, dorks, and dweebs who hide behind websites or nom de blog or the general anonymity of the Internet to reach out to other people in a safe manner without all the fear that comes with meeting someone face to face.

It’s a lot easier to relax and be yourself online (or be a totally fake person, but if you try that kind of thing you’ll generally get found out one way or another).  You don’t have to worry about the fact that you need a shave, or that you’ve got popcorn husks in your teeth, or that you’re a 450lb albino balding midget.  Nobody’s judging you for how you look, or how you’re dressed, or how much money you make.  It’s all about how well you write, the links you find, and the connections you make with other bloggers with your personality.

Deep inside, and I think this is probably true for everyone (it is for me) one of the big reasons you blog is because you like approval from other people.  Bloggers eat up comments like fat people eat up cake.  Every blog in history has some kind of hit counter on it, and I guarantee you that your average blogger checks it more often than they’d care to admit to.  I generally check my hit counter every couple of days because I don’t get a lot of hits.  On the sites I work at where I do get a lot of hits, I check those hit counters daily, sometimes several times a day.

Why is that?

It’s easier to write if you know someone’s going to read it.  Nobody’s going to write 500 words for 3 people, no matter how awesome they might be.

Awhile back, Holly and I wrote two similar posts talking about how we both struggle with what may or may not be undiagnosed ADHD.  She said I won, because I used a Fight Club reference, but I knew she’d won when Chez Bez shared her post.  It’s not like it’s a popularity contest (it’s not completely), or that her post wasn’t better than mine (it is), but in a way, readership and shares and links are all we have to keep us going (if you don’t get paid, that is… and if you want to keep getting paid, you’ll bust your ass to rack up the readership, shares, and links).

Increasingly, as companies leap onto everything that bloggers do and start to corrupt it (as I already have done with my shameless self promotion of everything I do, though I really share those things in the hopes that you, my reading friends, would be further interested in reading that stuff too), the only thing we’ve got is the opinions of other bloggers to make us feel like we’re being read by actual people, not Googlebots and marketers.

That’s all we’ve got.